“The language hadn’t been reinvented. It had come straight from my old world.”
She came to London to conduct research into the left-wing press of yesteryear. Before long, it became obvious that the anti-Zionist ideas she had seen on the campus protest in America had been been sown in newspapers and periodicals decades before.
“It became obvious to me that the Soviets had worked really hard to transmit these ideas to the global left in the 1970s,” she says.
“They were smart, they knew how to approach different factions of the left. In an attempt to make anti-Zionism understandable to different groups they would equate the Palestinian cause with the Vietnamese struggle against the Americans, with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and with those who resisted the murderous dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.”
Today Tabarovksy is the world’s leading expert in Soviet anti-Zionism but for a considerable time, in America, where Jews did not expect antisemitism to come from the left, her ideas were not taken as seriously as they should have been.
“I did acquire a following for the endless articles I was pumping out, but many people didn’t really understand how things I was warning about were relevant to them.
“I felt like a Cassandra,” she says, referring to the Greek figure whose prophesies were not believed.
“But the truth is that the antisemitism that has exploded across the world since October 7 is exactly as I predicted. I warned that any time a society is taken over by anti-Zionist ideology, you can be sure that antisemitic outcomes will follow.
“Jews who grew up in the USSR could now tell you this. Once the institutions become anti-Zionist, all Jews become suspect. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Zionist or not. They don’t even understand what Zionists are. When they speak about Zionists they mean Jews.
“We have an exceptionally well-documented history of Soviet Jews being discriminated against under an anti-Zionist regime and that is exactly what is happening to American Jews now. It’s crashing all around them, and it’s devastating to see.”
Izabella Tabarovsky as a child in the USSR[Missing Credit]
Had her warnings been heeded, could things now be different? “Probably not,” she says. “It was all pretty well advanced. But at least they might have been better prepared psychologically.”
Tabarovksy was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1970, a time and a place where she barely knew what an observant Jew was – there were no synagogues in the region – only that being Jewish marked her out for hatred. The Soviets might have tried to eliminate organised religion in the country but people’s ethnicity was marked in their paperwork.
But just as the Corbyn years and October 7 have turned many highly assimilated Jews into determined members of the tribe, so anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union made many of the country’s Jews quietly determined to identify.
Behind closed doors, they learnt about their heritage in small groups, learnt Hebrew in secret and treated prayer books – then contraband – with reverence. And whenever they could, they applied to leave the USSR. At enormous cost.
The Jews who would become known as refuseniks lost their jobs and friends and, in some horrific cases, were imprisoned and tortured.
“Some scholars now claim that for the Soviets it was a strategic mistake to identify Jews in their documents, to mark them out for discrimination because in doing so they made us feel more Jewish,” she says.
“But the truth is that even without the documents, we looked different. Jews don’t look Slavic.”
Indeed, growing up she was, she says, made to think there was something wrong with the way she looked. “I remember standing in a line for food once when I was 12 or 13, and I think I sort of moved awkwardly and stepped on someone behind me. Someone hissed from behind me, a poisonous half whisper, ‘What are they doing here? They need to leave. They need to go to Israel.’ And I remember thinking: well, yes, we’d love to go, but they won’t let us.’’
At home, being Jewish translated into her parents refracting things through a particular prism. She recalls coming home to discuss things she had been taught at school about world affairs and her father explaining why it might be only half the truth. And when it was time for her to go to university she understood Soviet antisemitism in so much as she expected not to be fully accepted on campus.
“Antisemitism and anti-Zionism were simply part of the Soviet Jewish experience,” she says.
In the event, she went to university in America. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 she emigrated to the US with her family. But in her latest book, Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, Tabarovsky draws on the experience of Jewish students in Russia, as well as the Jews who learnt prayers in secret and the young American Jews fighting anti-Zionism on campus today. They are all refuseniks, she says. The foreword is written by the Israeli politician and chess player Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years behind bars in Russia for being a refusenik. His message is one of defiance.
It is echoed by Tabarovsky who would also urge us to “reclaim” our peoplehood. “These are the two things we need today if we are to survive as a people,” she says, “because the war is not about Israel and it is not about Zionist Jews. The war is on the Jewish people as a whole. They want to split us up – split young Jews from their families and from Israel. Split the diaspora from Israel. We can’t allow it.
“Soviet Jews knew they couldn’t defeat antisemitism; the problem was too big. So they focused not so much on how to fight it as on how to strengthen themselves. And that’s a really important message in this movement. We can’t fight antisemitism if we don’t know who we are. We need to know what we are fighting for and to understand that it is a fight we need to be in together.”
Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, published by Wicked Son, is out now. The UK launch is at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism on January 28
londonantisemitism.com/book-launch-in-london-be-a-refusenik-a-students-survival-guide/
